Improving our performance depends upon feedback

We try, we get things wrong, we learn, we improve.

But in some areas of our professional lives feedback can be in short supply – until it’s too late.

You’re a comms person asked to give the leader of the council advice on a challenging issue. You don’t know them well. You’re not quite sure how to put things. You go in for a meeting and, well, you’re never asked back.

It happens. In such circumstances, detailed feedback may be limited.

Where communication is difficult, where pitching can be tricky and where we’re dealing with unknowns, we can often learn from others: observation and osmosis.

But difficult exchanges, which may by their nature be private, don’t provide many learning opportunities.

You get them right. Or you don’t.

Which is why Carl Welham and I have put together a one-day workshop designed to help comms people try difficult exchanges out for size.

So powerful are these opportunities, in terms of how they can frame your standing in the organisation, that we’ve called them “comms defining moments”.

Get them right and your stock will soar. Get them wrong and prospects can take a turn for the worse.

In the workshop, you’ll get the chance to learn from our successes and our mistakes. And you’ll have opportunities to try things out for yourself in simulated exchanges.

If you’re interested sign up for our session on 10 April. And if it proves to be a success, we’ll run it again.

It all depends on the feedback.

Carl Welham has been a Director of Communications in Nottingham, Reading, Sheffield, Bucks, Hackney, Oxford.

Mark Fletcher-Brown has been a communication consultant for more than 22 years and has recently published Perceptionomics, a guide to managing perceptions.

Book your place for their one-day workshop, taking place on 10 April 2019 in Birmingham.